Tomorrow's surveillance technology may be considerably more effective. But each uptick in protection will typically come at the cost of more intrusion into the privacy of ordinary people. For now, the public seems to find that trade-off acceptable, so scientists around the world have intensified efforts to perfect the art of surveillance, hoping to catch villains before they strike.

Research laboratories envision tools that could identify and track just about every person, anywhere -- and sound alarms when the systems encounter hazardous objects or chemical compounds. Many such ideas seem to leap from the pages of science fiction: An artificial nose in doorways and corridors sniffs out faint traces of explosives on someone's hair. Tiny sensors floating in reservoirs detect a deadly microbe and radio a warning. Smart cameras ID people at a distance by the way they walk or the shape of their ears. And a little chemical lab analyzes the sweat, body odor, and skin flakes in the human thermal plume -- the halo of heat that surrounds each person.

Is privacy a right we should claim when we're out in public? I may not want video cameras or sniffing sensors tracking me in my home, but if I go into a government building, a company's offices, or even a public park, isn't such scrutiny legitimate? (Of course, advanced nanotechnology may soon enable round-the-clock total surveillance of every citizen, which is where the risk of abusive policies and practices becomes more acute.)

The article continues:

Together these developments herald a high-tech surveillance society that not even George Orwell could have imagined -- one in which virtually every advance brings benefits as well as intrusions. Rapid DNA-based probes, for example, could help protect us from bioweapons and diagnose diseases, but they might also reveal far too much about us to health insurers or prospective employers. The trade-offs are uncomfortable, in part, because corporations and governments will continue to wield the most advanced surveillance systems. But ordinary citizens will also gain capabilities to monitor their surroundings with consumer technologies, from Web cams to Net search and tracking tools, allowing the watched to observe other watchers.

Here we get a mention of "watching the watchers," along the lines of the Participatory Panopticon envisioned by Jamais Cascio of WorldChanging.

Then, after reviewing a long list of developing surveillance technologies, the BusinessWeek article ends on surprising rhetorical note:

Over time, people may get smarter about how to live with threats and make use of technology without undermining their most basic values. They must. A country that sacrifices its citizens' freedom in the fight to protect them is no victor.

Protection vs. privacy: that is the tradeoff suggested here. But is it a false dichotomy? The author of this article seems to be making the mistake of equating privacy with freedom, and they are not the same thing.

As we have discussed before, if the intent is to achieve security and freedom -- not privacy -- then a tradeoff may not be required.

Author, scholar, and transparency advocate David Brin says, "The widely held belief in a tradeoff between security and freedom" is not only a faulty assumption, but also "dismal and loathsome." He claims it is not true that "there is a basic, zero-sum tradeoff between safety and freedom," or that "we can only augment one by diminishing the other." On the contrary, he points to "the value -- and empowerment -- of common citizens in an age of danger."

Rather than diminishing the role of the individual, advances in technology seem to be rapidly empowering average citizens, even as professional cynics forecast freedom's demise.

Brin's basic message seems to be that we are not required to choose between freedom and security; that, in fact, history shows us that the most open or "transparent" societies -- those with the least emphasis on secrecy and control -- also are the safest.

Surveillance, privacy, security, freedom, protection, oppression: these arguments will not go away. As technology continues racing ahead, the need for agreement and understanding about these issues becomes ever more urgent.

Some if not most laws are unjust on some level. The potential for tyranny increases as the level of surveillence increases; same problem as posed by assigning MM adminstrators. Even assuming perfectly just laws and enforcement mechanisms, it kind of defeats the point of being human if my every thought is known and bounded. In such a circumstance, I'd contribute what I could and then exit into an unsupervised inert simulation or something.

First, there's a difference between public surveillance and government surveillance. In public, any person could follow and detect various things about you, constantly. The reason people are upset about surveillance is not the intrusion, but the lack of accountability. If I'm being followed and detected the old fashioned way, I have the ability to detect who is following and detecting me. If there's a public camera, is it public access? Who has access to the recordings? Can I use a photo from a traffic camera to support my alibi should I be falsely accused of a crime?

Secondly, The trouble with government justifying it's surveillance with the zero-sum tradeoff argument is that most of the policies they implement don't provide security they claim to be trading people's freedom for. There is a zero-sum transaction happening, but it's a trade of the citizen's freedom in exchange for *the government's* freedom. Security is not increased at all, in these cases, we're just losing power as citizens to increase the power of government.

to combine these two concerns, We're giving away power to government that we could share a bit more equally. The problem with USAPATRIOT Act style power is that it not only invades privacy, but it leaves government unaccountable for that invasion. Why should it be allowed to keep all this data to itself, as long as we're arguing that we have no right to privacy in public to begin with?

Without a radical overhaul of our laws, such universal transparency multiplies the problem. I jaywalk a thousand times a year. How many married couples fell in love under circumstances that would constitute statutory rape? Loitering and littering laws would nab us all. Alcohol and cigarettes are legal but narcotics are contraband? I would be in a constant state of paranoia over routine actions in such a state.

Large scale government surveillance is an inversion of "innocent until proven guilty" - "everyone is guilty enough to justify watching them closely enough to catch them in the act".

With perfect surveillance, many if not most people could be found guilty of breaking some law they didn't even know existed - perhaps some part of the massively obscure tax code that could end up ruining them financially. That gives people in the government the leverage to get whatever they want:

Petty revenge - maybe you disrespected a TSA inspector in the airport, and suddenly you're on a no-fly list.

Political advantage - you oppose a candidate who has buddies in the IRS, and suddenly you're the subject of a tax fraud investigation.

Career advancement - after building up a good life for yourself, you look like a "big fish" to an investigator - and rather than looking bad for having wasted time investigating someone innocent, they twist your employees' arms until someone "admits" knowing something you've done wrong.

Money - you're rich, they're greedy, and they know some mistake you made that will cause you no end of legal hassles or penalties, not to mention ruining your reputation.

This situation - which we're not too far from already - is a perversion of "rule of law" - it's "anarcho-tyranny", where people in positions of authority can use the law to do pretty much anything they like, as long as they don't mess with anyone more powerful than themselves. Surveillance is a force-multiplier for anarcho-tyranny.

Before we know it, perhaps our family members are actually clones cum home security camera. I think that the evolution of security cameras will be faster than we thought. Let's just hope that whoever gets to use them will make use of cams in a positive way.